A NEW ERA OF GREEN ACTIVISM.

While writing this book, did you and the Step It Up team have in mind any movements of the past?I think for us the civil rights movement is the great touchstone of American history. It’s certainly one that I’ve studied and thought about an awful lot. I think that there are real similarities; I think that there are real differences, too. One of the differences is that nobody engaged in this work has to be as brave as the people who were in the civil rights movement. I don’t foresee a moment where anyone is going to come burn down my house because of climate change activism or throw a bomb in my church. On the other hand, the civil rights movement had one great advantage, which was that its leaders knew that eventually they would win. They knew they would have to go through hell, but they knew they would emerge on the other side. Martin Luther King was confident. I mean, read his speech the night before he was killed. We don’t have that same confidence because we don’t have all the time in the world. We’ve got a narrow window to change how we do things, and if we don’t change how we do things in that narrow window then it’s going to snap shut on us, and there won’t be much use having a movement.